


oh, come ON now

by caraminha



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man - All Media Types, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Deaf Clint Barton, Father-Son Relationship, Hurt/Comfort, Peter Parker Needs a Hug, Protective Tony Stark, Sensory Overload, Team as Family, Tony Stark Has A Heart, observant clint can see right through tony's BULLSHIT, soft dad tony stark tbh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-26
Updated: 2018-07-26
Packaged: 2019-06-16 15:11:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15439815
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/caraminha/pseuds/caraminha
Summary: Prompt from my Tumblr: The Marvel Fandom is really missing an opportunity here. I'm not mad! I am just... Disappointed of them. Like, who's the only parent in the Avengers, besides now Tony? Clint. Imagine Parent Friends! Clint knows the difference between 'worry for a teammate' and 'worry for a son'. And when he sees Tony with Peter, he Knows.





	oh, come ON now

  
Clint opened his mouth to speak, his index finger held out in front of him. 

  
His jaw hung open in anticipation of the words _that wouldn’t seem to come_ for about 10 seconds before he closed it, exasperated, and let his hand flop down. “God’s sake.” 

  
Tony and the Spider-Kid had turned to stare at him - Peter’s expression a softer, more confused one, Tony’s of frowning suspicion - before shrugging at one another and returning to their food. 

  
Nat kicked him under the table. “What?” He mouthed belligerently. She shook her head slowly. 

  
He rolled his eyes at her and leant back over his plate. 

  
“Whatever.” He muttered.

  
It was just as he was tilting his head back - mouth agape, pizza slice held aloft above it - that Tony _tinged_ his cutlery against Peter’s full glass of Coke.

  
“ _Drink it,_ Peter, it’s not a modern art installation. You know you get dehydrated after being in the suit, c’mon.”

  
Clint froze. His eyes darted to the pair. 

  
Peter was chuckling into his pint glass as Tony teased him, pushing the bottom of it higher into the air and sing-songing, _“Ooooh no, oooh no it’s gonna go! It’s gonna go!”_ till some of the Coke spilt over the edge and Peter sputtered. 

  
Clint squinted. 

  
_Alright then._

* * *

  
“Peter, status.”

  
He spied Tony flying up and out of the fray so far that he went above Clint’s rooftop lookout point. 

  
He afforded the man a glance, but, knowing better than to get distracted, he refocused on the battle below him.

  
He became vaguely aware of the Iron Man suit circling the huge city area in his peripheries after a couple minutes. “Peter, _report.”_

  
Nothing but battle buzz played into Clint’s hearing aid comm. He shot a deft arrow into the final alien’s brain, then rose to his full height (and no, his knees definitely _did not_ just click) and pressed a couple fingers to his earpiece. “Can you see him, Tony?”

  
“ _No,_ otherwise I wouldn’t be _calling him,_ Clint.” The _duh_ would have been almost audible if it weren’t for the laid-thick concern in Tony’s voice. _“Spider-Man. Report.”_

  
“Maybe he can’t hear you?” Steve suggested.

  
“He’s enhanced, Cap, he hears everything.” Tony retorted. “Peter! FRIDAY, get me Karen.”

  
“Who the hell is Karen?” Clint scrunched up his face.

  
“His AI, are we _done_ with the questions now?” 

  
“We’re almost done here, Tony, then we can help find him. I’m sure his comms are just fried or something.” Steve placated calmly.

  
“He’ll be fine.” Natasha tacked on.

  
“No need. I’ve got his location.“ Urgency colouring his tone, Tony swept down past the skyline towards Clint’s building at high speed, flying overhead and suddenly dipping into the street below like an airshow jet.

  
Clint threw Cap a thumbs up to confirm a mission well-done, then jogged down the fire escape steps in search of Tony.

  
Although they had spats sometimes, and yeah - maybe he took the piss out of the guy a little - Clint couldn’t deny that Tony Stark wasn’t a caring and compassionate man. He was hyper-aware of his teammates, forever making improvements to their armour and weapons and housing them all for free. 

  
In battle, too, Tony was always taking recon on his teammates health, was the first to get to you and get you patched up - and, hey, they all cared about one another a whole bunch – 

  
but come on.

  
There’s looking out for a team member, a quick; “Nat, you good?”, having each other’s backs in a fight, throwing an arm round your shoulders to help you Walk It Off.

  
Then there’s the alien (ha ha, alien) quality to Tony’s voice when he’s talking to Peter.

  
If Clint wasn’t entirely mistaken (and he rarely was), he could have sworn it was… parental? Dear _God._

  
His hypothesis was confirmed to him as he reached the ground, letting the heavy fire door swing shut behind him. The _bang_ made Peter, who was sitting on the ground of the alley and pushed up against a wall, flinch.

  
Tony hissed in sympathy and shot Clint a quick glare.

  
Clint cringed. He took a hesitant step towards them. 

  
Tony was out of the suit. It hovered to Clint’s right, a soft beeping that he could only imagine was Peter’s heartbeat playing into Tony’s comms. The man was crouched in front of Peter, who was giving him a brave smile.

  
Tony’s hands were on one each of Peter’s drawn-up knees, a thumb rubbing absently over the right kneecap. 

  
He murmured something to the kid that Clint couldn’t hear without his proper hearing aids, and Peter breathed into a pained smile, already almost-shut eyes falling closed. His head fell back onto the red brick behind him. 

  
The moment his eyes were shut, Tony’s expression fell headfirst into bleeding concern. His eyelids flickered up and down the kid and he swallowed hard. Clint couldn’t help but let the worry wash over him too. The fact that the kid looked very much like a cornered and frightened animal, small and shivering a little bit, made him want to give him a hug. 

  
He thought of Cooper and Lila and Nath as Tony swept the Spider-Man ask off the ground and placed a gentle hand on Peter’s cheek, saying something to him slowly. His mouth was barely opening as he spoke and Clint would’ve been pissed at Tony for clearly trying to exclude the semi-deaf guy from the conversation if it wasn’t obvious that that wasn’t the case - that Peter desperately needed quiet right now.

  
Peter’s hand raised slightly into a floppy thumbs-up and Tony’s face crinkled in anxious affection.

  
He stood and went near to the Iron Man suit, muttered a few things to FRIDAY that Clint only half-picked up on, (”comms to mute”, “Karen”, and “blackout? Maybe sepia”), before turning back to Peter and carefully helping him get the mask back on. 

  
Peter went lax in exhalation the moment it had slipped over his features. Tony smirked.

  
“Tony? Clint? You there? Pete all good?” Steve’s voice made him jump in surprise. Tony quirked an eyebrow at him that voiced only the slightest hint of “You okay?”, but it was definitely there. 

  
_See? That_ was the kind of Tony Stark brand of caring that Clint was used to.

  
“Uh, yeah– kid’s good.” He turned on his heel quickly and waited to reply at the end of the alleyway. “Think his senses are going crazy right now. Overload or something.”

  
Steve’s voice was soft and empathetic. “Okay. I’ll let Bruce know. You guys head straight back, we’ve got the clear-up in hand just fine.”

  
Nat chirped up in agreement. Clint cast his gaze back to the pair behind him, shadowed from the midday sun by the building, all head-resting-on-shoulders and looking about as much as a father and son as he had ever seen. “Sure thing.” He murmured distractedly.

  
He and Tony both offered to carry Peter, but the kid insisted on walking.

  
Huh. 

  
Kid was as stubborn as Stark, too.

  
If he didn’t know better, he would’ve assumed a blood relation there.

  
Good thing he didn’t know better.

  
Tony was going to be getting some serious grilling later.

* * *

  
He’d been waiting outside the medbay door for maybe 25 minutes when Tony finally exited. He held up the bottle of water and the bottle of ginger ale for him to take.

  
“You said he gets dehydrated after being in the suit, and I didn’t know how settled his stomach would be, so…”

  
Tony took them wordlessly, expression blank for a moment. It then quickly evolved from a grateful smile into a playful smirk. 

  
His voice was still quiet, and Clint automatically took a step towards him out of habit to hear him better. 

  
“Nice to know you care, Barton.” He jibed, taking a swig of the ginger ale. He tilted it towards him and smacked his lips. “You flattened it. That’s good. Thanks.”

  
“Nice to know _you_ care.” Clint shot back, ignoring Tony’s second comment about flattening the ale because _he’s not an idiot, he’s a dad too, he knows how to calm an upset stomach, for God’s sake,_ before he realised he’d just mentally referred to Tony as Peter’s dad.

  
Tony face narrowed. He motioned for them to come away from the medbay and into the elevator. Once they were in, his volume returned to normal. “He’s not my kid.”

  
“I wasn’t implying it.”

  
“You were going to.”

  
“I wasn’t.”

  
“You may as well have written it in permanent marker on your forehead.”

  
“Then how did you know I was going to ask unless it’s true and you weren’t thinking it yourself.”

  
“He’s not my kid.”

  
“Uh-huh.”

  
“Ya-huh. Not.”

  
“Uh-huh.”

  
“Glad we’re in agreement, then.”

  
“When’s his birthday. What’s his favourite colour. Favourite pizza topping.”

  
The elevator doors had opened whilst he’d spoken and Clint draped himself on a couch and grinned up at Tony, flipping his hearing aid setting to accommodate the larger, more echoing room. 

  
Despite being “annoyed”, Tony waited for him to alter the hearing aid before replying in a deadpan tone.

  
“August 12th. Red. Anything but anchovies. He’s not my kid.”

  
“Maybe not biologically, but…”

  
“Shut up. He has an aunt.”

  
“Good for him, I guess, but why are you telling me that?” Clint purred, enjoying _oh so much_ how easy it was to tease the man when Peter was the subject. Usually he didn’t take the bait so easily, brushing Clint’s taunts off with a suave retort.

  
“Because _she’s_ his parent. I’m his… mentor.”

  
Clint coughed “Father figure.” into his fist.

  
Tony stood before him, arms crossed and face displeased. 

  
Clint decided to stop.

  
“He okay, then?”

  
Tony’s face fell a little. He sat down. He looked tired. “He’ll be fine. He hasn’t been sleeping so good recently, so that doesn’t help. Just needs to sleep it all off for a while and take a truckload of paracetamol when he wakes.”

  
“How many does the kid need?”

  
“Usually give him half a pack.”

  
“Dang.”

  
Tony nodded, shrugged.

  
“Is this because he’s enhanced? Everything goes into hyperdrive?”

  
“Yeah. Kid can hear everything a town over.”

  
“Ouch. It happen often?”

  
“Not so much. Happened in school the other week, his Aunt had to pick him up from the janitors’ closet.”

  
Clint frowned. Poor kid. 

  
Tony’s expression may have been hard to read for some, but it had the conflicted _“I’d take this from you if I could”_ pain in his eyes and forehead lines and worried-at lip that Clint would know was a father’s prerogative from a hundred miles off.

  
“He’s lucky to have you.”

  
Tony scoffed. “I’ve done more bad by him than good. Kid’s just patient.”

  
He went to disagree, but divined from Tony’s tone that the Stark Stubbornness wasn’t something he could so easily shift on this topic. 

  
He simply bit his cheek, gave him a wilting look and patted his leg before standing to make them some coffee. 

* * *

  
Bruce joined them as soon as FRIDAY notified them that coffee was brewing (none of them could ever convince him and Tony to curb their addiction) and Steve and Nat weren’t far behind. 

  
They ordered food and sat about, relaxing and socialising and laughing, just enjoying being together - minus Thor, obviously - for a few hours before Clint would have to set off back home. 

  
Peter slipped in silently at around 8pm. 

  
He was in one of Tony or Pepper’s sweatshirts and blue plaid pyjama pants, hair adorably askew. He sat beside Tony.

  
Clint urged the conversation on to keep the attention off the kid, but even he couldn’t help but dart his eyes over to them every so often. 

  
Tony had his arm round the kid and Peter let himself be pulled into him. His eyes shut tiredly and he nodded limply at Tony’s whispered questions. 

  
Tony nodded towards the ginger ale and Clint passed it to him. Bruce stood, grabbed the painkillers and passed them over the back of the sofa. Tony winked at him in thanks.

  
He plied Peter with the pills then settled back into their embrace. Peter was out within 60 seconds.

  
Everyone hushed. 

  
Clint looked around at how they all looked at Peter with affection. 

  
“Well.” He said quietly, standing. “Guess I should be off. Laters, Nat. Bruce, Steve… Dad.”

  
Tony sucked his bottom lip into his teeth and shook his head slowly. He couldn’t say anything without risking waking Peter, and they all knew it. Everyone else burst into whisper-like laughter.

  
Clint jabbed the elevator down button and waved to Tony. “Seeya at the PTA, buddy.”

**Author's Note:**

> If you wanna send me a prompt or even just chat with me, my tumblr is caraminha and im happy to do either!!!


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